IN THE GOOD OLD SUMMER TIME

IN THE GOOD OLD SUMMER TIME

Our thoughts go to Phil Dike’s Balboa Harbor, William Wolfson’s Benches along the lazy path in the park, Francis Berry’s Olympic I field sports, and Luis Arenal’s Marble Player. But we can’t over look Corita’s ripe Tomato, or Clinton Adams’ Cabaret on Windward at Venice Beach and his Return to Collioure along the Mediterranean, Tom Farmer’s Clamdiggers or Romare Bearden’s farmer in The Lantern

Please Click on the Image for more information.

SPACE – ARCHITECTURAL SPACE – INTIMATE SPACE

Architectural or “architectonic” form basically describes structural elements that enclose space. The space can be symmetrical..or not. That space can be a building for a home – or a commercial mall…or a drawing…or a print…a painting …or a sculpture.

Tobey C. Moss Gallery presents architectural/architectonic form in works of art by Peter Krasnow, by Jules Engel, by Helen Lundeberg, by Lou Jacobs Jr, by Werner Drewes, by William Dole, by David P. Levine, by Clinton Adams, by Oskar Fischinger, by Leonard Edmondson and others.

Please Click on the Image for more information.

June WayneThe Artist

June Wayne and I met through prints…lithographs, to be exact. When she moved, to Los Angeles from Chicago in the 1940s, Lynton Kistler and his lithography workshop attracted her to the stone. By 1949 she was painting but also was working on the lithograph stone at Kistler’s. Her lithographs of 1950 – 1956 show that she was exploring crystalline structures and optics with her friends at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. The Sanctified, The Target, The Tunnel demonstrate her early fascination with crystals, The Bride, The Suitor and the Advocate continued that theme. Her painting – The Dreamers – presents her translation to the canvas.

She went on to make history – art history – the history of lithography in the United States. With her sure powers of technique and aesthetic senses, her technique grew and the reputation of lithography as a fine art medium grew with her.

The SuitorThe BrideThe Advocate

The Dreamers

The TargetThe Sanctified

Shine Here to us and thou art everywhere

In 1960 she founded the Tamarind Lithography Workshop with a grant from the Ford Foundation. Her mandate – to lift appreciation of the technique. She started with the printers. The dearth of trained lithography printers in the United States was a major obstacle. She brought Serge Lozingot from Marcel Durassier’s studio in France to train journeymen printers and she invited renowned artists to the TLW to explore lithography. They found that the symbiotic relationship with a collaborative printer encouraged their imagination and creativity. For many of these artists, lithography became a primary technique for their future work. Now, more than fifty years later, the international artists and printers she inspired are legion.

June Wayne was the living proof of the creative impulse. Major exhibitions of her work and a massive catalogue raisonne brought her art to an ever-widening audience. She never stopped making art – lithographs, paintings, collages, tapestry designs. As a FORCE and a LEADER she influenced community involvement, political action and creativity in young artists.

Often adversarial – always challenging, stimulating, interesting and informative, June Wayne was positive from her very beginning. We valued her friendship and cherish her memory.

Please Click on the Image for more information.

FRANK ROMERO
LIFE AND TIMES

Frank Romero showed an early affinity for making pictures that reflected his heritage. He was launched into public appreciation in 1959, at the age of 18, when his woodcut “Caballeros de la Noche“won First Prize in California State Fair, Sacramento. His ‘printing press’ consisted of a spoon and his muscles! This is one of three impressions he pulled.

Frank is a ‘giving’ person and has always been a part of development and renewal in central Los Angeles through his public murals and personal screenprints, block prints, constructions and paintings. Most of his murals reflect the large Los Angeles latino population, stimulating the growing interest for pedestrians, office workers, art seekers and shoppers.

In 1974 the University of California Irvine mounted a show of “Los Four” – Frank Romero, Gil Lujan, Carlos Almaraz and Roberto de la Rocha that subsequently was shown at LACMA and the Oakland Art Museum.

The Arrest of the PalaterosDeer CrossingCarro de Muerte

Homage to RomeroLos Caballeros de la NocheRed Freeway-Homage to Weston

4-Level Freeway InterchangeSnake in the GrassPalm Drive-In

The enthusiasm and vigor of Romero’s art is infectious. Through his paintings and screenprints, we share a concert at the California Plaza, or a burger at Dolores’s Drive-In … perhaps we remember snuggling at a Palm Drive-in or experiencing the

complexity of a Freeway Interchange!

Political commentary enters into Romero’s work too. See The Arrest of the Palateros as the overzealous Los Angeles Police Department – following the law! – arrested poor ice-cream vendors in MacArthur Park.

Occasionally Romero goes ‘off the wall’ in three dimensional pieces like Deer Crossing or in collaboration with his students on the obsessive car culture of Los Angeles. (Yes, he is also a teacher and curator). Currently, see the show of his work at the Museum of Latin American Art (MOLAA) in Long Beach through May 21st.

Please Click on the Image for more information.

LEONARD EDMONDSON (1916-2002)

Leonard Edmondson claimed that he captured inner sources as inspiration for his compositions…inspirations that stimulated creative spirits throughout his life.

His paintings, etchings, drawings, collages, lithographs, woodcuts are expressions of discovery that he willingly shared with us. He was bursting with that creativity. View these and more at the Gallery as well as on our website.

BroadcastState of PatternsScenery

GerminationTropical Gardens IInitiation

Sphere of HostilityUntitled DanceLetters Toward Experience

Please Click on the Image for more information.

CLINTON ADAMS 1918 – 2002From the Estate

CLINTON ADAMS was an artist, a painter, a teacher….and a printmaker. He was introduced to the lithographic limestone by Lynton Kistler in about 1946; a ‘romance’ ensued. At Kistler’s studio workshop he met a June Wayne, recently arrived from Chicago. Adams created a series of lithographs throughout the 1950s that brought him together with June Wayne when she founded the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in 1960. While the major portion of Adams’s estate passed to the University of New Mexico Museum, the artworks presented here are from his Estate as received from his son, Michael.

Please Click on the Image for more information.

WERNER DREWES 1899 – 1985

Art and Artists grow, evolve, develop. Through their art, artists reveal the broad history of the creative period. One obvious contributor to ‘his’-story is the work of Werner Drewes.

DREWES’s work spans the 20th Century, first at the Bauhaus, then his travels throughout Europe, South America and the United States and his emigration to the U.S. in 1930, his leadership in the American Abstract Artists group mid-1930s his participation in the Federal Arts Project and then on to professorship at Washington University in St. Louis.

Through woodcuts, etchings, collages and paintings, the story of American art through Werner Drewes is ……history! We’ve offered his art since the early 1980s and invite you, again, to explore and bring it into your life.

Please Click on the Image for more information.

FIGURATION
Depiction of the figure is so personal and, yet, so universal.

ROGER HERMAN Field WorkersJ. JAY MCVICKER Embryonic Forms

J.R. MCMILLAN Dance

EUGENE FLEURY Idyll

CARLOS MERIDAPopul Vuh #1ARTHUR SECUNDA Torito

Please Click on the Image for more information.

DRAWINGS

Drawings bring us back to beginnings … the impelling idea that stimulates the artists’s creativity. Follow the thought!

DRAWING is the basic capture of the artist’s thought. Drawings are ‘true’…oftimes truer than the final composition/painting/print. Here are drawings that convey the impact of the artist.

Seated Nude

FRANCISCO ZUNIGA’s monumental nude conveys the mass and the weight of its goal: a sculpture in bronze. But this drawing says it all! In addition, Zuniga has ‘modeled’ it with strokes of color that enhance the figure.

Night Vision

LEONARD EDMONDSON uses white ink on heavy black paper and SCRATCHING through the paper surface to draw “Night Vision”, probably to proceed to a painting. The use of the black surface is dramatic.

Girl Reading Letter

ISABEL BISHOP carried her small sketch pad and a pen with her all the time, everywhere! They provided glimpses of her experiences, often to be transferred to canvas or the etching plate.

Via dello Studio

The year before he turned to collage as his prime medium, WILLIAM DOLE drew this view from his pension window in Italy. See the architectonic structure of this simple rendering! That same focus on architecture pervades his collages.

Five Horses – Study

MILLARD SHEETS’ study of horses was an early hint of the many times ‘horses’ would be part of his lithographs, paintings and murals.

IN MEMORIAMTYRUS WONG 1910-2016

Tyrus Wong knew many adversities and arose above them to a unique and successful career that spanned many worlds and years. We enjoyed his sense of humor, his encouraging sense of life-to-be-LIVED. He expressed himself through his art – as a designer and painter on Bambi and other animated films at Disney Studios, as a composer of greeting cards, as a lithography print maker with Lynton Kistler, as a fine art painter…and as a kitemaker of his own creations! He was like none other. We feel privileged to have known him as a friend and as an artist.

We offer these few lithographs for your collection as evidence of his activities with Lynton Kistler’s Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles.

New Fallen Snow

Large Horse with Flying Mane

Horse Looking UpHorse Looking Down

Blind Pencil Vendor

Horse Looking AwayHorse Prancing

By clicking on each image you will find a description of the piece, the price and the connection to us.
We love to hear from you!

It’s Rumble Holidays

JULES ENGEL created sound….but silently! He created images that conveyed sound….trilling, bombastic, explosive and asymmetrical. But why use words when the image says so much more!

Engel made these collages, then photographed them for a five minute film = ” RUMBLE”. You can ‘hear’ each image! You can acquire each @1800. But a grouping of three or more are specially priced.

This is the ‘Giving’ time….and we offer suggestions for you to gift to favored friends, grandchildren, sons/daughters, curators……….and to YOURSELF! For our part, we will offer 10% (and sometimes more) on your purchases. That’s OUR gift to you!

Figures …..

Through figuration, these artists have captured repose, strength, introspection and hope – but also can suggest angst, ambiguity, defeat and withdrawal.

Welcome to my world through – what else! – visual images.

A composition that is stable, that invites, that intrigues, that is engaging, that provides a haven….somehow, right now, I want images to engage and encourage me.
These are just a taste of the richness to be discovered at our Gallery. More to follow!

THE PATH THROUGH ARCHITECTURE

JULES ENGEL Punch and Judy II

CLINTON ADAMS Dichotomy

LOU JACOBS JR Richfield Industrial Design

SPACE is within, is around and defines MASS and STRUCTURE. The artists shown here conceptualize those architectural elements. Each work of art conveys the sensitivity of the artist to that SPACE and MASS..

The principles of Architecture usually relate to the design of a structure in/or encompassing space. Those architectural or ‘architectonic’ principles are used broadly in art works on walls as well as paper and canvas or in wood, metal and concrete, etc.

Peter Krasnow was DARING!

The 1940s, the World War II and John Entenza’s “Art and Architecture” magazine were great stimulants to the feelings of a ‘new world’ to be shaped and Peter Krasnow’s idiosyncratic art exemplified these feelings through elements of architecture, narrative abstraction and a ‘hi-key’ palette.

The structure of Untitled 1941, K-7 1947 and K-7 1955 are building blocks with life-affirming colors and subtle under-lying narratives. In K-7 1955 we even find Krasnow’s spectacular carvings juxtaposed into his painting. These three paintings ‘speak’ to Krasnow’s excited reaction to the tenor of the times. At the same time, they reflect the awakening of new directions in art.

California was a conduit for these new directions. After graduating from the Art Institute School in Chicago in 1916 and a tentative couple of years in New York City, Krasnow – like so many other artists in the United States and in the world at large – was alert to the promise of an unlimited environment in which to say ‘new things’…through the visual arts, through music, through literature.

Peter Krasnow’s history in California,, from the early 1920s to his death in 1979, was marked by innovation, invention, creativity, curiousity and daring. Among the small but intense art community in the Los Angeles area, Krasnow was regarded with respect and recognition. His introduction to this community through his lifelong friend, Edward Weston, was also a welcomed ‘passport’. Portraiture was Krasnow’s technical ‘bread and butter’in the 1920s, but even to these classical forms he introduced individual elements that pronounced ‘modernity’.

Ever challenging himself, Krasnow explored printmaking through relief prints (linocuts) and lithography in the late 1920s.. Though he soon abandoned these techniques as ‘limiting’, he returned to painting in watercolors as well as oil on paper, canvas and board, particularly after being awarded a Guggenheim grant in 1930 to work in the Dordogne region of France for a couple of years.

Carving also engaged his attention, beginning in the 1920s, which initially found unique expression through his commissions and linocut carvings in the late 1920s to ..his ‘demountables’, beginning in about 1935 consisting of extended wood carvings joined through uniquely carved niches.

When he returned from France in 1934, carving became his passion. These ‘Demountables’ are legendary. Only in the early 1940s did he return to painting with new inspiration and new forms.

This Signature Art Exhibition (Virtual Tour with Audio Links) guides us through the 1930s to the 1970s in Los Angeles. Evident is the lack of a ‘style’ to define the period – BECAUSE each of these artists was an independent innovator, using personal techniques and expressing personal creativity.(Virtual Tour with Audio Links)

JULES ENGEL(1901-2003) His life and work was a pivotal core for the art history of experimental animation in the world today. Animation: Accident, Rumble, Aviary, Meadow-Tumbling, many more.

A Fine Retrospective Exhibition is on view right now at the Laguna Art Museum: PETER KRASNOW: MODERNIST MAVERICK

Betrothal

Lithograph 1928
16 x 10 1/2 inches (40.6 x 26.7cm)

Untitled – K.7, 1947

Oil on board 1947 K-7, 1947
42 1/2 x 48 inches (107.95 x 121.9cm)

St Andrew’s One Cent Coffee

Oil on canvas c.1920
26 x 20 inches (66.0 x 50.8cm)

From the 1920s to the 1970s, Krasnow made paintings, prints, drawings, monoprints, watercolors and carved sculptures. His imagery is compelling as he creates in his personal ‘language’. The proof is in the viewing!

JULY 18TH – JULY 30, 2016

BETYE SAAR

Assemblage and Collage – Lithograph – Etching – Screenprint

Flaming Heart #9

Collage and painting 1987
14 x 9 7/8 inches (35.6 x 25.1cm)

Mystic Sky with Self Portrait

National Racism

Betye Saar was inspired while watching Simon Rodia building the Watts Towers in the 1930s. She transforms discarded objects into personalized narratives, social commentary – and visual poetry. Ever mindful of her heritage, Saar communicated her sensitivity while exploring the media – from assemblage, collage and painting to lithography, etching and screenprinting. She combines narratives and drama while digging deeply into her African-American, Irish and Native American ethnicity.

Aware of the span of life, Betye Saar feels Death as central to existing – a reminder of Life…a reminder to feel Alive!

After graduating from the Art Institute of Chicago in 1916, Peter Krasnow and his Rose moved to New York where he became part of the Whitney Club and art circle that included photographer Edward Weston. Encouraged by Weston, Krasnow moved to Los Angeles in 1923/24, where portraiture was his primary source of commissions. He worked in oils on canvas, but also created lithographs, linocuts, drawings and watercolors that reflected romantic as well as biblical themes.

In 1930, with a Guggenheim grant, they moved to the Dordogne region in France. His paintings and watercolors were exhibited in Paris but, with the rumblings of Hitler’s militarism and warnings from Weston, he returned to Los Angeles in 1934. There, Krasnow felled backyard trees to carve remarkable organic sculptures…massive trunks were contrasted with unique joined segments that he called `demountables’

By the 1940s, Krasnow refocused upon painting and made a dramatic change in his imagery and palette. His compositions were abstract and architectonic, in a high-key California palette which, over the next thirty years, often subtly incorporated abstracted folk themes and iconography.

Krasnow’s work has been exhibited and included in many museum and private collections. He and his art were a featured focus in John Entenza’s “Arts & Architecture” magazine in the 1940s. This June to September of 2016, Krasnow’s work is shown in ‘PETER KRASNOW, CALIFORNIA MODERNIST’ at the Laguna Art Museum.

Gordon Wagner [1915–1987] was the the leading pioneer behind assemblage art influencing George Herms and Betye Saarwhom are each inspired by poetry and spirituality. These modernist artists are currently being featured inside Tobey’s gallery in Los Angeles and can always be purchased at her On-line Gallery.

‘Shrine Box’ was created between 1961-64, assembled during Wagner’s regular sweep of the tidal detritus. It measures 32 x 17 x 9 inches or 81.2 x 43.2 x 22.9 cm. “The Zinc Witch and the Philosopher Queen Sat Down . .” is pasted on one side. . . a collection of miscellany. Today, Wagner was active until the day he died in Long Beach, California, on December 4, 1987. In 2016, ’Shrine Box’ is available at $24,000.

Betye Saar has moved through printmaking, collage, assembl
age, sculpture and to installation work. Her constructions deliver personal, social and political messages through haunting visual poetry. ‘Blow Top Blues: The Fire Next Time’ available at $3,500 in 2016.

Can you find L – O – V – E inside this featured work? George Hermsaptly signs all his work with a ‘LOVE’ stamp. For George, art-making is love. In 2016, ‘Klutz, Putzs & Schmutz’ available at $14,000.

“It’s an attempt to be able to use the environment and what’s in the environment as raw materials so that the line between life and art begins to become dissolved. You can actually take chunks of reality and use that as the raw materials of your work of art.” – George Herms

This assemblage was created in 1992 during the U.S.A Presidential Election in which Al Gore declined running for chief position and instead became Vice President to Bill Clinton. The collage measures 26 x 20 x 11 1/2 inches or 66. x 50.8 x 29.2 cm. It’s LOVE stamped and made up of previously discarded “trash” materials including torched wood, bumper sticker, metal and pigment.

Herms aptly signs all his work with a ‘LOVE’ stamp and there is a great love that shines through – love for the people, the places, the things that have touched his life. For George, art-making is his way to show his love to the world.’92 Ore is available at $24,000 in 2016.

“I’m the kind of person who recycles materials but I also recycle
emotions and feelings.” – Betye Saar

This artwork was created in 1992, a color lithograph with collage on wove paper. The impression measures 21 1/2 x 25 1/4 inches or 54.6 x 64.1 cm. It’s signed, dated and titled in the lower left corner. It is numbered 29/100. This specific impression of Mystic Sky with Self Portrait came to Tobey directly from Betye in her Los Angeles studio.

Mystic Sky with Self Portrait has a folk art aesthetic, “The stars, the cards, the mystic vigil may hold the answers. By shifting the point of view, an inner spirit is released. Free to create,” says Betye Saar describing the piece. Saar’s self portrait depicting mysticism, history, memory and nostalgia is available at $3,200 in 2016.